About The Workshop
SW69-Legality, Decision-Making Contexts, and Institutional Design
Convenors: Flavio Scuderi Di Miceli; Matija Žgur
Contact: flavio.scuderidimiceli@unipa.it ; matija.zgur@uniroma3.it
In recent years, growing attention to behavioural insights and the influence of decision-making contexts has significantly shaped the debate on the functioning of public institutions. These reflections, however, have primarily focused on the behaviour of citizens, leaving in the background an equally crucial dimension: how rules are applied within public administration. This workshop proposes to shift the analytical focus from the external addressee of the norm to the public official responsible for its implementation, examining the relationship between the principle of legality, organizational conditions, and the design of administrative procedures.
The starting hypothesis is that compliance with legality does not depend solely on deliberate adherence to a rule but can be strengthened – and in some cases made effectively possible – through the design of institutional contexts that facilitate conformity. Between the normative command and its execution there exists a psychological and organizational gap that cannot be reduced to a mere issue of individual will. This gap is particularly visible within public administrations, which are complex decision-making environments characterized by high cognitive load, where rules are filtered, simplified, and translated into operational practices before being applied.
From this perspective, it becomes essential to examine how sources of law function in practice within administrative settings. While legal theory describes a hierarchical pyramid of sources descending from constitutional norms to administrative acts, everyday administrative practice often operates in reverse. Public officials frequently begin from circulars, guidelines, internal instructions, or established practices, turning to higher-ranking sources – constitutional provisions, international conventions, or European law – only in exceptional cases. These higher-level sources impose significant cognitive and interpretative demands, which may be difficult to sustain in ordinary administrative contexts. Organizational simplification thus becomes a functional necessity, yet it may also create a growing distance between administrative practice and the principle of legality.
Building on these premises, the workshop seeks to explore whether legality can be reinterpreted not only as the formal validity of a norm, but also as the outcome of conscious institutional design. Facilitative measures and legal design tools do not replace the legal command nor weaken its binding force; rather, they operate on the conditions of its application, making compliance less effortful and more stable. From this perspective, many dysfunctions in administrative action may stem not from a deficit of legal validity or formal effectiveness, but from a lack of effectiveness in practice, attributable to insufficient consideration of the decision-making contexts in which rules operate.
Call for paper
Against this background, the workshop invites participants to address several interconnected questions: How can the principle of legality be reconsidered in light of behavioural insights and organizational analysis? What role do secondary sources and internal administrative practices play in the everyday construction of legality? How do cognitive and procedural costs affect the actual possibility of complying with a rule? Can administrative institutions and procedures be designed in such a way that legally compliant behaviour becomes the simplest and most ordinary course of action? What constitutional and systemic limits constrain an approach focused on facilitation and institutional design?
The workshop welcomes theoretical, comparative and empirical contributions from legal philosophy, constitutional theory and related social and organizational sciences. Attention will be given to papers that foreground the analysis of the behaviour of public officials and of decision-making environments within public administration, as well as the functioning of sources of law, their perception from the perspective of normativity in everyday administrative practice, and the development of the principle of legality. Abstracts in English should be between 300 and 500 words and clearly indicate the research question, methodological approach or main expected findings. Submissions must be sent in PDF format and accompanied by a brief biographical note (maximum 150 words) to flavio.scuderidimiceli@unipa.it and to matija.zgur@uniroma3.it .
